Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
Devil Take the Hindmost is a lively, original, and challenging
history of stock market speculation from the seventeenth century to
the present day. Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the
speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival
in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to
"stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley (where wine
sold at auction by an "inch of a candle"), to the
infamous South Sea Bubble of 1719, which prompted investor Sir
Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of
heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people". Here are
brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the
"assurance of female chastity"; credit notes and lottery
tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from
Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary
Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from
the railway mania of nineteenth-century America to the crash of
1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to
day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a
fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.
"The greatest hits of financial silliness recounted coherently and...gracefully...Chancellor does a fine job of capturing the atmosphere of the times". -- Fortune magazine
